Chapter Four

...In a speech today at the New York Paranormal Institute, Professor Zeller, the former director of the CIA’s Project Star Gate, claimed that the human race was approaching a breakthrough into a new age, when humans would be able to access and manipulate cosmic forces with the power of mind alone. The sceptics in the audience noted that Professor Zeller had never provided any concrete proof of his increasingly grandiose claims...

-AP News Report, 2015

“You know,” Art said, several days later, “anyone would think that you didn’t believe me.”

The man facing him refused to smile. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said, flatly. “We have to test you as thoroughly as we can.”

Alice, sitting next to Art, smiled at him. “It’s nothing personal,” she assured him. “You would be astonished to discover how many frauds there are who try to get themselves onto the Company’s payroll ... or, for that matter, how many real remote viewers simply have a bad day from time to time and cannot produce anything. We test them heavily to see if they score above the mean on the Zeller Scale, more than the law of averages would allow for.”

Art scowled. Alice had, at his request, provided him with files on the CIA’s research into the paranormal, but most of the files didn’t seem to apply to him. The CIA’s small group of remote viewers – men and women who could send their perception out of their bodies and start roaming across the world – weren’t telepaths. The testing system the CIA had devised wasn’t intended for telepaths and it showed. Art had tried his hand at remote viewing, at Alice’s suggestion, only to discover that whatever abilities he had, he didn’t have that one. He couldn’t see through walls, or clothing, let alone send his mind roaming away from his body.

“Fine,” he said, dryly. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

The man facing him – he had refused to give his name, silently daring Art to peek into his mind – produced a sealed pack of cards from a pocket, tore it open and shuffled them with the ease of long practice. Art guessed that he was a poker player when he was off duty, which suggested all sorts of new and interesting uses for his powers – if anyone on the base could be convinced to play poker with him. The ability to know if a person was bluffing or not, let alone to see what cards they held, would be very useful.

“The odds, in case you are interested, are one in fifty-two against you,” the man said. He produced a card and held it face-down on the table. “What card have I produced from the pack?”

Art shook his head in irritation. Apparently, some of the CIA’s paranormal operatives were able to predict the cards without having someone else look at them. That, too, was an ability Art didn’t seem to have developed. The man looked at him, shrugged, and held up the card so that he could see it, but Art couldn’t. Art looked into his mind and blinked. The man was concentrating hard on the same thought – jack of hearts, jack of hearts – yet his thoughts were shaded with falsehood. He had a more organised mind than Alice and it took Art longer to realise that the card was actually the six of diamonds.

“Six of diamonds,” he said, finally. He couldn’t resist adding a snide comment. “And you were thinking of the jack of hearts.”

The man seemed, just for a second, to blink in surprise. “Not bad,” he said, grudgingly. “That was very clever, Hans.”

Art rolled his eyes at the bad joke. Clever Hans had been a horse who, according to the story, had learned to count and answer questions. It had turned out, after investigation, that the horse’s owner was subconsciously cuing the horse to give the right answers. The CIA seemed to be aware of the possibility that someone on the base was giving cues to him, hence the several different formats, the different questioners and the stranger questions. Alice hadn’t been the only person to challenge him to dive into their minds and pull out the answers.

The base, Art had discovered after asking the right questions, had originally been a command and control centre for military operations in the event of a bomb taking out the White House and NORAD. The base had been exposed by an inquisitive reporter – the lowest form of life, in Art’s opinion – and the CIA had obtained it after the government had spent billions of taxpayers’ money on building a new complex in a secret location. Project Looking Glass was merely the latest in a long line of CIA projects to use the base, forcing the CIA to scramble to outfit the base for Art and any other telepaths that might be discovered. Art privately hoped that they would have the sense to remain undiscovered. People just didn’t react properly around a telepath.

Alice, at least, seemed to accept that he could read her mind, but others – the ones who believed him, at least – were far less inclined to take it peacefully. No matter how many times Art swore that he wasn’t peeking through their minds without permission, they seemed unwilling to believe him and avoided him where possible. The sceptics, on the other hand, refused to believe that he could do anything special until he showed them the truth, at which point they joined the other group. He hadn’t understood, at first, why the CIA had kept sceptics on the base, but Alice had explained that they helped keep the researchers honest. Project Looking Glass was always starved of funds and a handful of researchers had tried to fake up results a few years ago, just to get the funding they needed. It hadn’t struck Art as particularly honest.

“No worries,” Art said. They ran through several more cards before the man nodded and stood up. “What are you going to do now?”

The question, as always, provoked a deluge of thoughts from the person’s mind. He was going to go back to his quarters, get very drunk and then report back to his shadowy superiors at Langley. They probably wouldn’t believe him when he reported that Art was a genuine telepath, but then...he hadn’t believed either, not until he’d seen the proof. He was oddly worried about what telepaths meant for the future of the human race.

“Nothing in particular,” the man said. If he knew that Art knew he was lying, he refused to show any sign of awareness. “Thank you for your time.”

Art watched him go and then looked up at Alice. “Don’t they believe it yet?”

Alice gave a pretty shrug. “You have to understand,” she said. “The ones who backed Project Looking Glass are doubtful because you don’t fall into any of the expected categories. The ones who wanted the project shut down don’t want to believe in you because that would mean that the project shouldn’t be shut down. The ones who think that a telepath could solve all their problems are also the ones who think that funding will be redirected from their particular projects...”

“Oh,” Art said. “And to think I used to think that the CIA knew everything.”

“A cunning tissue of deceit spread by our devious political superiors,” Alice said. “It’s good to know that something works.”

Art frowned. He hadn’t asked – because he didn’t want to know the answer – but he had a nasty suspicion that he was working solely for the CIA now. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. In the military, the CIA and the State Department competed for the position of least-liked government bureaucracy; the former because the information they provided was often wrong, the latter because they gave away gains the military had won at huge expense. Art had been a young enlisted man in Iraq during the Surge and he believed, firmly, that the State Department and the CIA had, between them, prolonged the war. It might well have been an unfair belief, but it was his. And now he might well be working for the CIA. He would have to hang his head in shame when he returned to his unit, if he was ever allowed to return to his unit.

Alice, clearly unaware of his thoughts, grinned sourly. “Everyone thinks that we have the ability to see everything, control everything and shape the world the way we want it to be,” she said, dryly. “They don’t understand that there are inherent limits in intelligence-gathering, just as there are in everything else, and that – at best – we see through a glass darkly. Or maybe we don’t have to any longer; you don’t have to guess at what someone is thinking.”

Art was still thinking about it an hour later, when they reported to the base’s medical facility. As befitted a bunker intended for top military and civilian leaders, the medical facility was first-rate, although the CIA had apparently had to fly in some of the more advanced medical scanners from private hospitals and research facilities. Art had honestly never considered just how many ways the human race had to monitor brainwave activity, or how little the human race understood about the brain. It had made him wonder if he’d somehow learned to use a part of his brain that hadn’t been working beforehand, but the doctors had set him straight. The human race used most of its brain, at least in theory.

“Your test results are very interesting,” Doctor Peter Sampson said. He’d explained that he’d worked with the remote viewers before moving on to carry out research into mind-machine interaction at a classified CIA-operated research facility. Sampson had been delighted to hear that the CIA had finally discovered an actual telepath and, according to Alice, had needed no prompting to sign an updated set of security agreements and join the project. “If you’ll take a look at that...”

Art smiled. The doctor was a tall lanky man with a shock of brown hair and a slightly-manic attitude to life. His thoughts, Art had discovered, seemed to run and jump in strange channels, moving from place to place faster than Art could follow. He was unquestionably a genius, yet Art privately wondered about his grip on reality. He didn’t want to be too close to a madman. With telepathy involved, the madness might rub off.

The wall-mounted display was showing his brainwaves, as they’d been recorded over several days. The Marine Corps had never recorded his brainwaves, Art had been told, which was apparently unfortunate as they didn’t have any baseline to identify any changes. Even so, comparing his brainwaves to the average person’s revealed some odd spikes in his mind, even when he wasn’t actually trying to use his telepathy.

“That spike there, I think,” the doctor said, “is your actual telepathic activity. Just for a few seconds, your brainwaves...”

Art interrupted quickly. “Layman’s terms, doctor, please,” he said. The first time they’d met, Sampson had sprouted off an impenetrable wall of jargon that hadn’t made any sense at all, even to a mind-reader. “I’m just a dumb jarhead and I need plain English.”

“Very well,” Sampson said. “Basically, human brainwaves are electrical activity caused by the firing of neurons within the brain. The level of brainwave activity changes depending on what you’re actually doing ... ah, when you are asleep, your levels of activity are profoundly different to when you are awake. Certain people can actually control their brainwaves to some extent, allowing them to work towards merging their minds into computers ...”

He broke off, perhaps remembering that he wasn’t supposed to talk about that particular program. “The important point is that we used Electroencephalography – what you laymen call EEG – to monitor your brainwave patterns while you used your telepathy,” he said, tapping the small controller on his wrist. “That spike within your brain represents telepathy.”

Art frowned. For someone who hadn’t seen a real telepath before Art had arrived, the doctor seemed surprisingly confident. “When you use your telepathy deliberately, the spike skyrockets,” the doctor added. “Even when you are at rest, however, the spike remains active; I suspect that you will never manage to block your mind completely. You seem to have become a receptor rather than a transmitter, although I imagine that, given time, other telepathic powers will develop.”

“Oh,” Art said. He rubbed the back of his head, feeling the static swelling within his mind. “How certain are you of this?”

“That spike isn’t very common, even as a once-off,” the doctor said. “It is the only unusual thing about your mind. The really interesting point is that we can use this to check out other telepaths. There is a good chance that some of the people in mental hospitals are actually telepaths who never learned to control their telepathy.”

Art considered it. He had to admit that it sounded logical. “And what will you do with the results now?”

“Continue to study, of course,” the doctor said. He didn’t quite say stupid, but it took no telepathy to hear it within his voice. “You must understand that this represents a priceless opportunity for research. Why, just by studying you, I have conceived a dozen new theories to account for the unexplained manifestations of brainwave patterns within human minds and...”

Art held up a hand. “I understand, doctor,” he said, firmly. He didn’t want to carry on with the tests, but there was no choice. “Can I suggest that we get on with it?”

***

Later that evening, Alice returned to her quarters, locked the door with her handprint and keyed the small secure laptop she’d brought with her. The computer was designed for operations in hostile terrain and bringing it with her seemed unnecessary, but her superiors had insisted. It hadn’t occurred to her until much later – when she’d finally realised that telepathy was actually real and it wasn’t another attempt to waste time and funding on a scientist’s pet experiment – that the advantage in using the secure computer was that it needed her handprints to work, rather than just a password. Lieutenant Russell wouldn’t be able to hack into her machine, even if he pulled all of her knowledge out of her mind.

It was a truism that the CIA never slept. The Directorate of Science and Technology – which, among other classified programs, funded research into ESP and the paranormal – needed to remain at the forefront of research, whatever it took. Alice had heard, when she’d been briefed for the first time, that the Directorate’s Director – her ultimate superior – was very interested in telepathy. He’d fought with Congress for a larger black budget and scrabbled with the other directorates to ensure that the remote viewing project received all the resources it needed. When he’d heard that a genuine telepath had been discovered, he’d ensured that Lieutenant Russell was transferred into the CIA. Alice sat back and relaxed as his face appeared on the laptop’s screen.

“Officer Spencer,” Director O’Donnell said. He looked tired, Alice noted; she suspected that he was, once again, working late at the office. She’d been told that working for the company tended to put a lot of strain on marriages and even relationships, not least because CIA officers couldn’t talk about what they did with their partners. Alice’s own relationships had floundered on the same principle and dating fellow officers was frowned upon. “I don’t have much time, so this will have to be quick.”

“Yes, sir,” Alice said. Director O’Donnell would have been reading all of the reports that had been forwarded from the base, but he preferred to keep hands on contact with his officers, believing that the person on the spot knew what was going on better than home office. It was a rare attitude in the CIA. She ran through a brief outline of what had happened since they’d last spoken – very little, apart from additional tests – and concluded with a comment about Doctor Sampson’s proposed research program to look for additional telepaths. “We’re reaching the limits of what we can do here, sir.”

“So I understand,” Director O’Donnell said. He sounded distracted, which was odd. Normally, even when talking to a relatively junior officer, he was polite and formal. “What are your impressions of Lieutenant Russell?”

Alice flushed, lightly. “He seems a nice person,” she admitted, finally. That, at least, was true, although she knew that it was far from enough. Some of the most embarrassing disasters in the CIA’s long history came from ‘nice’ people. “I think he’s growing bored with the procedures here. He isn’t a lab rat, sir.”

“And most of the remote viewers volunteered for service,” the director agreed. He tented his fingers and frowned. “There are...other parties within the National Intelligence Community who have gotten wind of what’s fallen into our lap. They want a share in the excitement.”

Alice frowned. “What do they want, sir?”

“For the moment, nothing, but that is about to change,” the director said. “I want you to warn Captain Russell – we’ve bumped him up a rank or two – that he may be deployed outside the base within the week, perhaps sooner. Matters are coming to a head.”

“Yes, sir,” Alice said, puzzled. What matters were coming to a head? Who else wanted to use a telepath? “Should I pass on any other message?”

The director shook his head. “Not to the Captain, Officer Spencer,” he said. “We’re very pleased with your progress so far. Hopefully, in the next few days, you should have a chance to operate alongside other...elements.”

Abruptly, he straightened up. “We’ll be in touch, Officer Spencer,” he said, flatly. His voice hardened suddenly. “Until then, carry on as directed. We’ll see you soon.”

His image vanished from the screen. “Yeah,” Alice muttered to no one in particular. She’d been given odd orders before, but the ones she’d just been given were the oddest. “Be seeing you too.”